Observations from Lowell Observatory, Arizona - New 2007 Mar. 22, 20h UT

The occultation was recorded from three telescopes at Anderson Mesa

To: dunham@starpower.net
From: Steve Welch 
Subject: Fwd: Pluto success from my friend at Lowell
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:33:25 -0600

David, here is a note from my friend Philip Massey, who was  
commandeered into observing this Pluto occultation at Lowell this  
weekend.

Steve

Begin forwarded message:

  On Mar 19, 2007, at 7:19 AM, Philip Massey wrote:

    Well, the Pluto occultation went very well here.  There were 
    three  of us: Bob Millis was at the 31-inch, Marc Buie was using 
    an IR photometry at the 72-inch, and I was using a  fast CCD 
    (2ms readout) to take a series of 3-sec exposures at I.  As you 
    know, the event was extremely  slow, as Pluto is almost at 
    quadature. (I figured this out when I drew a little figure for 
    Rita.)  Here is the zero-th order light curve we got. (Marc did 
    the reductions).  Apparently Pluto is mostly atmosphere---look at 
    how slow that sucker fades. 

    Anyway, it was great fun, and I actually SAW the event happen  
    while looking at the readout: there just happened to be a star 
    that was just a bit fainter than Pluto+star on the  frame.  A 
    couple of minutes after the nominal mid event I noticed that 
    Pluto had gotten FAINTER than the  comparison.  Marc said that 
    Palomar also had the event a couple of minutes late.  
    Fortunately my instructions were to take data for half an hour, 
    so I have the complete event.  Bob got a light-curve too 
    (although quite a bit  noisier---the 31-inch is smaller, the CCD 
    a lot worse, I guess, and he was at "R", where the star was much  
    fainter.